As everyone knows, people go to the beach to leer at scantily-clad folk, or to be leered at while scantily-clad. So how dare anyone go to the beach without flashing their bits at everyone?
The burkini is obscene and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere! At all!
Wow, that burkini is really offensive! It’s got a hood. And it covers the woman’s legs. How obscene…
Ok, so burkinis look stupid. But lots of clothes look stupid, should they be banned? Like those caps with cupholders so you can drink through a straw without having to carry the can in your hand. Shall we ban them too?
Spot the dickhead
(Actually, maybe we should ban the cup-holder cap. And French people. If we just banned France and fizzy pop, all the world’s problems would be solved, in one (two?) fell swoop.
Now, if you wear clothes on the beach, it’s absolutely appropriate for the police to come and make you strip. In public. At gunpoint.
I know France is all tense and stuff after the terrorist crap going on there. But when terrorists attacked the London Tube did the British government ban hijabs and turbans and white baggy trousers? Answer: No. Cos although the Brit government is really really stupid, reactionary and anti-human rights, it wasn’t that really really stupid, reactionary and anti-human rights. (I hope our present government hasn’t got that stupid yet…).
Oh yeah… don’t forget that the thought police know what you’re thinking:
Psi-Judge Cassandra Anderson: the acceptable face of thought crime control…
I’m not a security expert. So why don’t you listen to one? This video is Bruce Schneier, a well-known security and cryptography expert, taking questions at DEFCON 23. He addresses the issue of back doors at about 07:20, but the entire video is worth watching.
If you don’t want to watch it, I’ll paraphrase: The feds say that ISIS recruits via Twitter. A recruiter will get into conversation with people, and the feds can monitor that okay. But then the recruiter says “go download secure-app X” and all of a sudden the authorities can’t monitor them any more. This makes the cops sad. So they want to put back doors in all the messaging apps. But that is not going to solve the problem!
(About 09:10) “This is not a scenario that any type of back door solves. The problem isn’t that the main security apps are encrypted. The problem is that there is one security app that is encrypted. The ISIS guy can say ‘Go download Signal, go download Mujaheddinsecrets, go download this random file encryption app I’ve just uploaded on Github ten minutes ago.’ The problem is not the encryption apps that the authorities want to get into, the problem is general purpose computers. The problem is the international market for software.” Back doors are not the solution for the problem the authorities claim to have.
You’d have to put back-doors in all messaging apps. Not just the mainstream ones. Not the not-so-popular niche apps that some people like to use. ALL apps. Including ones created by ISIS guys and uploaded to whatever-server-wherever-whenever. “So we need to stop talking about that [back doors] or we’re going to end up with some really bad policy.” [about 10.00]
A lot of “centre-ground” (and right-from centre) commentators and “moderate” Labour MPs are pissed off that Stop The War Coalition think that French foreign policy regarding Syria might have provoked the shootings and bombings in Paris in November – and that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has not distanced himself from the anti-war group.
Labour MPs appear to be just as annoyed by Jeremy Corbyn’s links to the Stop The War coalition as they are about his comments on shoot to kill. In the questions following David Cameron’s Commons statement on the Paris attacks, several MPs used the opportunity to make coded attacks on Stop The War for a blog it published, titled ‘Paris reaps whirlwind of western support for extremist violence in Middle East’. It has been since been removed (cached version here) and Corbyn said he was glad it was deleted — but he has yet to condemn the fact it was published in the first place.
One Labour MP said the suggestion that the French people were to blame for the attack was ‘akin at the time of the Second World War to blaming the Jews for their deaths under the Nazis’.
Frontbencher Hilary Benn refused to rule out resigning if Mr Corbyn attended the event [a Stop The War Coalition Christmas fundraiser] as Labour MPs lined up to condemn their leader’s opposition to armed police shooting to kill terrorists.
This is so disingenuous, and not the first time politicians and political commentators have come out with this nonsense that somehow Western military action abroad doesn’t provoke terror acts at home. Tony Blair, UK prime minister in 2005, denied at the time that the 7/7 bombings were in any way provoked by British military action in Iraq – and he’s still denying it. But, after the bombings, a video was acquired by an Arab TV station in which Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the suicide bombers, said the attack was in response to British military foreign policy in the region.
On the tape the bomber said: “Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.
“I and thousands like me have forsaken everything for what we believe.”
He said the public was responsible for the atrocities perpetuated against his “people” across the world because it supported democratically elected governments who carried them out.
“Until we feel security, you will be our targets,” he said.
“Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight.
“We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.”
Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Inayat Bunglawala told BBC News:
“Mr Khan has allowed his hatred to distort his moral compass.
“However, this tape does serve to confirm that the war in Iraq and our policies in the Middle East have indeed led to a radicalisation amongst a section of Muslim youth.”
The same is happening now. While it would be ridiculous to claim that the people slain in Paris somehow “deserved it”, it must be acknowledged that the terrorists – all French or Belgian citizens who had connections with ISIL – did see the French military action in Iraq and Syria as a provocation.
Corbyn can see the connection, and now his political rivals – in Labour and in other parties – want to use his honesty as another lever to undermine him.
On 25 September the Imperial War Museum apologized for an exhibit that allegedly portrayed Jewish soldiers who fought the Nazis during World War Two as ‘terrorists’.
A poster of Jewish warriors was captioned: “Terrorist activities: Men of the First Battalion Jewish Brigade during a march past”; adding, “The Jewish Brigade was formed in September 1944 and fought in Italy under the British Eighth Army. Many of its members went on to join the Hagana and other illegal formations.”
The Hagana was the largest of several Jewish paramilitary groups which operated during the British occupation of Israel, known at the time as British Mandatory Palestine.
It took a less active role than more radical resistance groups such as the Irgun and Lehi in fighting the British occupation, focusing primarily on defending existing Jewish communities – though its more elite strike-force, the Palmach, did at times carry out offensive operations against Arab militias and British occupation forces. As the precursor to the IDF it played a central role in fending off the combined Arab invasion during the War of Independence.
I have reproduced the offensive picture above. The poster was captioned:
‘Terrorist activities: Men of the First Battalion Jewish Brigade during a march past’; adding, ‘The Jewish Brigade was formed in September 1944 and fought in Italy under the British Eighth Army. Many of its members went on to join the Hagana and other illegal formations.
The Hagana’s elite strike-force, the Palmach, did at times carry out offensive operations against Arab militias and British occupation forces. As the precursor to the IDF it played a central role in fending off the combined Arab invasion during the War of Independence. In other words, the Palmach (and, by association, the Hagana) was a terrorist organization, as were the Irgun and Lehi. I fail to understand what the problem is in saying this: apart from that dead horse ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ Yawn, pass me a comfy duvet.
As “Emmanuel Goldstein” has written:
Without Menachem Begin’s Irgun terrorists’ King David Hotel bombing, the Officer’s Club Bombing, the “Night of the Beatings”, the Acre Prison Break, the Sergeant’s Affair, and the many other attacks on the British military, the Union Jack would still be flying over the Holy Land today.
A case can even be made that Begin’s terrorists were responsible for hastening the end of the British Empire. When in India, Malaya, Burma, Ceylon, Cyprus, Uganda, Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Jamaica, etc they saw how a few Jews in Palestine had forced the withdrawl of the British, they were emboldened to follow likewise.
Bearing mind all the current talk about apologizing for slavery and even paying reparations [link][another link], wouldn’t now be a good time for Israel to say sorry about their terrorist atrocities (King David Hotel, Officer’s Club Bombing, Night of Beatings’, etc etc ad nauseum)? Let’s not forget that Irgun, after some extremely deadly teething troubles, integrated into the Israeli Defence Force we all know and love; and that in 1980 the Israeli state instituted the ‘Lehi Ribbon‘, basically a medal for Lehi terrorists, making Lehi respectable and a source of pride. The latter part of the Wikipedia article about the Lehi group enumerates some of its acts of terror and violence, and there is a whole article about attacks and atrocities by Irgun. Will the Israeli state make an apology, even a mealy-mouthed conditional ‘sorry’? I doubt it.
Interesting article in the Guardian, on how social media experts are tracking and identifying foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq. These analysts work for the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), at King’s College London. The ICSR is “the first global initiative of its type” and is frequently contacted by counter-terrorism officers “hungry for information on the continuing flow of Britons to the ranks of Isis.”
The ICSR claims to have greater success in tracking fighters than any government-run organisation, even though its resources and its access to information is much more limited than those available to the likes of MI6 and the CIA. According to the article, Professor Peter Neumann, the leader of the team, says hat blanket surveillance is not effective unless you have the skills to decode the information acquired.
Neumann said that the centre had built an enviable repository of online data from open sources – tricks that the security services are keen to learn and replicate, although the ICSR refuses to hand over data to the intelligence agencies. He added that the databases were compiled using legal means, with no hacking of accounts or even the use of fake online profiles.
“We are using information that is openly accessible to anyone who wants to look. Over the years we’ve become quite clever, but none of what we’re doing involves hacking and obviously we do not have special powers granted to us by the authorities,” said Neumann, who advocates a more targeted approach to intelligence-gathering rather than reliance on mass surveillance techniques.
So the strategy employed by the NSA and GCHQ is less effective. They collect huge amounts of information but do’t know what to do with it. Whereas the ICSR’s more targeted approach yields much better quality intelligence. For example, Shiraz Maher, senior fellow at the centre, has a good grasp on what jihadis are like because he actually orchestrates conversations with fighters over Facebook and Twitter. He says “From an intelligence perspective, social media allows us to gauge their mood and gives opportunities to perhaps create or exploit dissent. Before social media you would have needed to have recruited spies.”
An example of this ability to gauge the mood of ISIS fighters and their supporters is provided by Melanie Smith, another ICSR research fellow. She told the Guardian There’s been some grumblings recently. Some of the British women have been complaining because it’s the depths of winter and there’s no electricity. The water’s been so cold they can’t do their washing and their kids are getting sick.” Obviously, knowledge of the enemy’s state of morale can be extremely useful when planning operations.
“Jihadi John”, British ISIS fighter involved in the killings of Western hostages. Photo from Wikipedia
Professor Neumann says that if he had had a larger team 2 years ago, the ICSR would have been able to identify “Jihadi John”, the British ISIS fighter involved in the killings of several US and British hostages. As it is, the ICSR can only assert that the extremist is not Londoner Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, as claimed by the media.
So the experts believe that the approach espoused by Western leaders such as David Cameron and his beloved snooper’s charter is wrong. What is needed is targeted intelligence gathering and surveillance of named individuals. And where will these names come from? Well, if the ICSR has been able to identify fighters using only information that is already in the public domain, imagine how much more they could do with warrants and access to restricted files. This could all be done within the current legal framework, with no need for snoopers’ charters and large-scale trawling of everyone’s communications.
If this gets me a death threat, I’m gonna be real pissed off…
So, the Charlie Hebdo murders have brought freedom of expression to the forefront. So, how far does the freedom of speech spread? Can we make jokes about the Paris killings? Can we take the mick out of the cartoonists who were stupid enough to get themselves killed by publishing cartoons of Mohammad, when they’d already been threatened with death for publishing cartoons of Mohammad?
One rule for them, one for us? Hope not. But it’s starting to look that way.
Also, think on this: first of all, the “I am Charlie” thing was meant to tell the terrorists that they could not force the “democratic world” to give up its values and freedoms. But now, David Cameron says he’ll push through his beloved snooper’s charter if the Tories win the 2015 election in the UK. The rest of the fucks are also making such sounds. Screw “I am Charlie”… it’s gonna end up as “I’m a right Charlie” when our beloved democratic leaders take away the rights we have that make us different to the bastards who are killing in our streets. We’re all fucked, at the hands of our wonderful democratic leaders. The wonderful union of last week is falling apart already.
Oh yeah, one more thing: Hayat Boumedienne, the partner of X, was named by the French police as X’s accomplice in the kosher supermarket siege; but now we know she wasn’t even in France when the violence there kicked off. French forces will no doubt kill her if they get a chance (“resisting arrest” bullshit…). Just more of their demonisation of the other, same as the widened search for possible accomplices… rounding up anyone the killers knew. One day it’s “On est Charlie”, the next it’s “kill the Moslems!” Yeah, Western Europe is a real centre of tolerence. Fucking bastard Euro pigs…
First, a truly incomprehensible attack on innocent Jewish men, women and children, using the excuse there are a lot of Israelis “in danger” from “Palestine officials”.
Let’s examine the charges by Israeri concerning the “oh-so-dangerous Militants”:
Here’s the low-down on why Netenyahu is overseeing these brutality. The Israelis have state-of-the-art firearms, whereas the Palestinian community have virtually nothing left.
Sling vs helicopter gunships, automatic rifles, grenades, the rape of Palestinian women and children… how can any sane person see the Israeli response as proportional???
An example (thanks to the Guardian: after Palestinians allegedly killed in a terrorist attack on a Jerusalem synagogue, 2 PFLP suspects (note that word: suspects) killed “in retaliation by Israeli “security” forces. Netenyahu ordered the destruction of the homes of alleged suspects (no judicial oversight, no rule of law, Netenyahu decides these men did the attack, and not only killed the “suspects” but also ordered the demolishment of these so-called “suspects” homes. Was that proportionate action? Making families homeless, even though the people living there would have had no idea of what, if anything, the “suspects” may have been up to. This is not justice: it’s a bare-faced landgrab, designed to make Palestinian families homeless and leave the way clear for more Kibbutzin and other illegal “settlers”.
US leader Obama criticized the attack on the Synagogue, which killed four innocent people, including US citizens Aryeh Kupinsky, Cary William Levine, and Moshe Twersky, and injured several more. He said:
There is and can be no justification for such attacks against innocent civilians.
“The thoughts and prayers of the American people are with the victims and families of all those who were killed and injured in this horrific attack and in other recent violence. At sensitive moment, it is all the more important for Israeli and Palestinian leaders and ordinary citizens to work cooperatively together to lower tensions, reject violence and seek a path forward towards peace.”
So you can see, Obama deplores the attacks on the Jews in Synagogue, but didn’t make any mention of the fact that the families of the alleged killers have had their homes demolished. Isn’t there something in American society about the right for private, family life? Oops, I nearly forgot: Any provisions in the US constitution only apply to US citizens. Palestinians being forcibly removed from their homes is okay as far as Uncle Sam is concerned. Plus Israel is an important ally of the USA’s. Whereas the USA, like Israel, consider Palestinians to be the enemy. Even the children are viewed as terrorists-in-waiting. It’d be funny, if you didn’t realize it was about actual living human beings. Fucking Netanyahu, fucking Obama.
This is a public service announcement… with wrecking balls!!!
Why oh why doesn’t someone put an end to the Israeli’s war on innocents and its seizure of Palestinian property? Can someone explain to me: let’s assume one of the “suspects” did something wrong. Surely the suspect should be arrested and face a fair trial. But no, the “suspects” are killed, or tortured, or similarly disappeared. And an entire family is made homeless. Is this right? I’d love to hear a rational argument from pro-Israeli figures on this subject.
The Israeli government is despicable. Collective punishment, ghettoization, arrest and murder of innocent people. That’s the kind of crap the Nazis got up to. And now the Israelis are up to it. Makes me feel disgustingly sick. I hate the authorities in Israel, and I hate the Western powers (eg USA, UK, France) who support them. Leave the Palestinians alone FFS! Even the Nazis didn’t keep up their war of terror for this long!
On the Guardian website today (29 August 2014) is a top-of-the-page headline: “New powers to seize terror suspects’ passports”. Now maybe that seems fine to you – can’t have terrorists suicide-bombing their way around the world on British passports, can we? But that is not the intent of prime minister Cameron’s plan, and by wording their headline as they have, the Guardian (and, I expect, other newspapers) are deliberately misrepresenting what the government are up to.
The current law already allows for the confiscation of terror suspects’ passports – “terror suspects” meaning people who are suspected of engaging in terrorism. This new law is rather an extension of the old, much-criticized “control orders”, which allowed the authorities to keep people under virtual house arrest because the police think the individual might engage in terrorism. The law allowed for control orders to be imposed on individuals without telling the “suspect” what evidence existed. If you’re put under a control order as a result of evidence that you and your legal representatives aren’t allowed to see, how are you supposed to effectively defend himself? What if the evidence is faulty? How can you appeal, when you don’t know what lies the authorities are using to impose the control order?
And now the thought crime is going one step further. “Oh look, there’s a British Muslim trying to leave the country. He’s got a return ticket to Paris on the Eurostar, but maybe he isn’t really planning to return. Maybe he’s going to travel on to Syria or Iraq and behead people. After all, that’s what Muslims do, isn’t it? Look on Youtube, you’ll see a video of an American journalist being beheaded by a British Muslim. Bloody British Muslims, all the bloody same. Better take away is passport.”
Secret evidence, secret courts, all makes me think “secret police”, and “police state”. Maybe you don’t care because you’re not a Muslim? Well, who do you expect to come rescue you when the authorities decide that people like you might be a threat? Pull your head out of your butt; and don’t give me any of that “Can’t happen here” crap, because it is happening here, now.
Incidentally, the UK terror threat was raised from substantial to severe for the first time since 2010. This means that an attack is deemed to be “highly likely” – although not necessarily imminent. Who decided that? Them. And you must never question what they say or do…
***TOTALLY OFF-TOPIC ANNOUNCEMENT***
According to WordPress, this is my 399th post. Which means the next post will be #400!! That’s got to be a cool anniversary, yeah? So get in touch, tell me what you’d like me to write about, and I’ll try to please you all. If you’re familiar with I HATE HATE!!! you know I’m perfectly capable of writing about anything, even stuff I know absolutely nothing about. And if no one makes any suggestions, I’ll pretend someone did and write some drivel about something no one knows or cares about. Something else you know I’m perfectly capable of, if you are at all familiar with this blog…
After 8 days of relative quiet in Gaza, an Israeli air strike killed the wife and son of the Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif. As the attack was targeted at Deif, Israeli military consider the Hamas commander’s home as fair game. They have tried to kill Deif several times. They use air strikes as a method of assassination, and of course a missile will kill not only the intended target but also anyone near him. This is what happened overnight (20 August).
Scene of the air strike that killed the wife and child of Mohammed Deif
I wonder: if Hamas bombed the home of an Israeli commander and killed his family, would Israel shrug its collective shoulders and say “Fair enough”? Or would they condemn it as an evil terrorist attack slaying innocent children etc? What do you think? Seriously, I’d love to know your opinion. Please let us know via Comments.
Using air strikes to carry out assassinations is a cowardly act. Israel is known to have efficient special forces and other soldiers. So when they want to kill a particular military individual, why don’t they send in troops to find and shoot him? Why do they prefer to use missiles launched from fighter planes or drones, which will kill arbitrary people in the area, such as innocent passers-by or, as in this latest case, non-combatant family members? To me it seems plain: the much vaunted Israeli Defence Force is commanded by cowards. Much better to kill 100 children than to risk losing a single soldier.
I do not support Hamas, or the Al-Aqsa Brigades or Islamic Jihad. But Israeli arrogance and cowardly aggression makes me sick. And the fact that only 6% of Israelis recently polled think that too much force is being used against Gaza makes me wonder why this so-called free, developed democratic state gets so much support from the UK and other governments. Israel is a blustering, cowardly terrorist state.
Seems to me that many terrorists are the epitome of political prisoners. According to MI5:
Although there is no generally agreed definition of terrorism internationally, in the UK the Terrorism Act 2000 new window defines terrorism as:
The use or threat of action designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public, or a section of the public; made for the purposes of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause; and it involves or causes:
serious violence against a person;
serious damage to a property;
a threat to a person’s life;
a serious risk to the health and safety of the public; or
serious interference with or disruption to an electronic system.
See my emphasis there? If someone is in jail for a politically-motivated act, surely he is a political prisoner?
Groups like Amnesty International pick and choose amongst politically-motivated prisoners – from Wikipedia:
AI uses the term “political prisoner” broadly. It does not use it, as some others do, to imply that all such prisoners have a special status or should be released. It uses the term only to define a category of prisoners for whom AI demands a fair and prompt trial.
In AI’s usage, the term includes any prisoner whose case has a significant political element: whether the motivation of the prisoner’s acts, the acts in themselves, or the motivation of the authorities.
“Political” is used by AI to refer to aspects of human relations related to “politics”: the mechanisms of society and civil order, the principles, organization, or conduct of government or public affairs, and the relation of all these to questions of language, ethnic origin, sex or religion, status or influence (among other factors).
The category of political prisoners embraces the category of prisoners of conscience, the only prisoners who AI demands should be immediately and unconditionally released, as well as people who resort to criminal violence for a political motive.
See how airy-fairy their definition is? It’s a nonsense.
Look at the case of Nelson Mandela. He was almost universally viewed as a political prisoner. But was he non-violent? Again, from Wikipedia:
Although initially committed to non-violent protest, in association with the SACP he co-founded the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in 1961, leading a sabotage campaign against the apartheid government. In 1962, he was arrested, convicted of conspiracy to overthrow the state, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia Trial.
Bloody hypocrisy. “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” blah blah, okay, but surely he’s a political prisoner whether you sympathise with him or not?
Go see Martin McGuinness, deputy first minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and ask him if he was a political prisoner. When he was tried for being near a car containing 250 pounds (110 kg) of explosives and nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition, he refused to accept the legitimacy of the court and declared his membership of the Provisional IRA without equivocation: “We have fought against the killing of our people… I am a member of Óglaigh na hÉireann and very, very proud of it.”
Martin McGuinness of the IRA… political prisoner or not?
Posted by Martin X 
I HATE HATE!!! 